David Malin

David Malin is a veteran retail real estate executive who has been in the shopping-center business since 1990. His early career was spent in the Mid-Atlantic as a top-producing leasing broker and asset manager with H&R Retail and Maryland Financial Investors, where he represented national retailers including Target, Ross and PetSmart. He holds a B.A. in Political Science and History from McDaniel College — where he was an NCAA Academic All-American — and a J.D. from the University of Baltimore School of Law.

In 2002 Malin relocated to the Phoenix "Valley" to lead acquisitions and development for Vestar, one of the largest privately held retail developers in the western U.S. As Vice President of Development and Acquisitions (2002–2017), he oversaw the development of more than 5 million square feet of new shopping centers in Arizona, including Tempe Marketplace (~1.3M sq ft), Oro Valley Marketplace, Lake Pleasant Towne Center (~800K sq ft) and Canyon Trails Towne Center, anchored by tenants such as Target, Walmart, Home Depot and Kohl's. From roughly 2009–2017 he shifted to value-add work, acquiring and repositioning over 4 million square feet of existing centers across Arizona, Colorado and Texas — including projects such as Orchard Town Center and Desert Ridge Marketplace.

In 2017 Malin left Vestar to found Scottsdale Development Partners, a boutique firm he leads with co-founder Stephen Huey; together they cite over 50 years of combined retail investment and development experience. SDP describes itself as focused on "transforming retail centers into future-forward assets," acquiring under-performing properties and revitalizing them through active management, re-tenanting and redevelopment.

• Buys existing, underperforming retail/shopping centers in strong locations and repositions them — a value-add / opportunistic strategy rather than ground-up-only development or startup investing.
• In his own words on his first SDP deal: *"When the previous owner put The Shops at Dynamite Creek up for sale, I saw this as a huge opportunity."*
• Targets centers where he can update the physical asset, diversify the tenant mix (fitness, restaurants, healthcare, personal services) and drive occupancy through active management.
• Deal sizes to date have been individual centers in the ~$10M range; SDP operates as a small, hands-on principal buyer.
• Geographic sweet spot is the Western U.S., concentrated in metro Phoenix, plus Flagstaff and Southern California.